SOURCE: McCarthy, Mary Susan. Introduction to Balzac and His Reader: A Study of the Creation of Meaning in La Comédie Humaine, pp. 1-18. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982.

In the following essay, McCarthy explores the attention Balzac paid in his novels to the craft of writing as well as to the reader's creative activity of reading, using for her analysis reception theory and touching too on other literary theories that examine the relationship between author, text, reader, and meaning.